Page 20 of Captured By the Pakhan

"She knows my son exists."

The room goes very quiet between us. That is the whole problem at its core and he instantly understands it.

Because he is the only person alive who understands the shape of that particular fear. Eleven years of work, four cities, a map on a wall, and it all comes down to a ten-year-old boy in a house upstate whose existence is known to exactly eleven people, and now twelve.

"Ah," Yeremey says. “This is about Sergei."

"Yes."

He looks at me for a long moment, there is nothing in his face that I want to see, and then he picks up his folder.

"I'll have it for you by Friday," he says as he goes.

I told him it is about Sergei.

It is about Sergei.

I make myself say it a second time, silently, in the empty room, and it comes out with a flaw in it — I know exactly what it means when a true sentence needs saying twice.

Chapter 6

Raven

Yaroslav Estate, 1:52 AM

The gap in between the cameras is twelve minutes and it took me six days to find it. Not one gap. Two half-gaps that overlap for twelve minutes, twice a night — the seam where two systems meet and neither one quite covers the other.

The north camera bank sweeps on a variable cycle, which is smart, because a fixed sweep is a gift. But the variable cycle is generated from a seed that resets at midnight, which means the pattern is unpredictable on any given night and identical to itself an hour later. Sweep, gap, sweep. And at 1:47 the north face goes to a nine-minute interval that starts at the kennel end and works west.

That's half of it. The other half is Grigor.

Grigor walks to the generator shed at eight and again at two, he does it in the same order every time, and on the second walk he stops in the lee of the shed and smokes a cigarette he is clearly not supposed to be smoking. That's four minutes with his back to the north face, plus a minute either side of him getting there and getting back.

Overlap the two and you get twelve minutes, twice a night, where the north tree line is not watched by a machine or man.

I've had it for two days and I've spent both of them checking it, because you don't bet your life on a pattern you've seen once. Now, I've seen it four times.

Six days to get here, and most of that wasn't watching. Most of it was making myself boring. That's the part they don't teach you and you only learn once — the work isn't finding the seam, the work is being a person nobody thinks to watch while you find it.

So for six days I have been exactly what they expected when they hauled me out of that shed. Difficult in small, harmless ways. Bad at cooking, worse at pretending otherwise. Loud about the small things. I complained to Andrei about the coffee three separate times.

I have gone to bed at ten every single night, and laid there fully dressed counting camera sweeps through the window. I made sure to be caught looking out of it on day two, so that by day four nobody thought anything further of it.

You want to be predictable. Predictable is a coat you put on so you can leave in it.

The rest of it I got sideways. The generator shed I got from a ten-year-old thief. The wind and the dogs I got from the cabin. Grigor's cigarette I got from a torn filter in the grass by the north face, still dry when the ground around it wasn't, which meant it hadn't been there long and meant somebody stands in that spot regularly enough to be careless in it.

Nobody handed me anything. I built this out of a cigarette end and a chewed lead and six days of being unremarkable, and I want that on the record, because in about forty minutes I'm going to throw all of it away.

I've got a coat off the boot room hook — Karina's, dark, too big, which is better. I've got a lighter and forty-one dollars from a drawer in the utility corridor that nobody has opened in a at least year, judging by the dust on the runner. I've got a bottle of water inside the coat and my boots laced tight.

I have been lying on top of my covers fully dressed since eleven. At 1:51 I go out the utility door.

It opens from the inside. Andrei told me that himself on day one, as a boast, and it never once seems to have occurred to him that a door which opens from the inside is still a door.

The cold comes up off the wet grass and takes the breath out of me. Forty feet of open lawn to the first hedge and it is the longest forty feet I have ever crossed — no cover, no story if anyone sees me, just a woman in a stolen coat walking away from a house at two in the morning.

Hedge. Down behind it. Count to ten.